Sermon 23 - Plans

Sermon 23 - Plans

Jeremiah 29:11

For I know the plans I have for you, says the Lord. They are plans for good and not for evil, to give you a future and a hope.

This sermon is inspired by someone else's sermon.  He was preaching a year-end sermon, and asked if we were making any plans for the new year.  He was probably talking about resolutions.  New year's resolutions are plans to do better in the coming year.  But as soon as he mentioned that, and use the word "plans," it prompted a whole bunch of thoughts, and I figured that I should put them down.

We make plans.  Lots of us make plans.  There's the New Year's resolutions.  Sometimes those resolutions are just intentions, but some people actually go to some length to plan, in detail, how they are going to carry out good intentions.

Some of us like making plans.  Some of us *don't* like making plans.  But our society is very, very big on plans.

There's plans for our life.  First of all there's career planning.  School counselors, well starting with school counselors, job counselors will tell you to make plans.  Chris Hadfield's book, about becoming an astronaut, greatly emphasizes his plans, and his specific activities to develop various skills, all aimed at becoming an astronaut.  He planned well, and he developed a tremendous number of different skills, through different activities, all of which worked towards his becoming an exemplary astronaut, when it was his turn.

Job recruiters, and human resources people, use this idea of planning to try and assess whether or not you are a good employee, or a good candidate for a job.  They ask what I tend to call the "what do you want to be when you grow up?" question.  This is generally worded something along the lines of where do you want to be in five years?  What position do you want to have in ten years?  One interviewer, in posing this question to me one time, essentially asked me "what do you want to have done by the time you die?"  I told her that I knew that this wasn't the right answer, but that I'd already done it.  I'm very proud of the first book that I published.

We are bombarded by advertising suggesting that we need to plan our finances.  We are sold credit cards on the basis of the fact that they will help us to plan our finances.  We are sold life insurance on the same basis.  We are sold banking services on the basis that they will help us plan our finances, so that we can have enough money to do the things we want when we retire from working.

Yes, our society is very big on telling us to make plans.

Here's the thing though: life is what happens when you're making other plans.

Plans are our attempt to control.  Control our lives, control our finances, control our security, control as much as possible about what goes around on around us, that might affect us.

But, here's the thing.  We aren't *in* control.  We aren't even *supposed* to be in control.  God is supposed to be in control.

Now, I do make plans.  I'm reasonably good at making plans.  In my professional work, I have to make a lot of plans.  I'm involved in business continuity planning.  I am involved in disaster recovery planning.  I am involved in emergency management planning.  I do a lot of planning.  I teach other people how to do planning.  And I'll probably come back to this business continuity and emergency planning.  But we'll leave it at that for the moment.

I don't do New Year's resolutions.  I never have, and I've never really seen the point.  If you want to change your life, if you want to improve certain aspects of your life, why not just start now?  Whenever "now" is?  Whenever you notice that there's something you should be doing better?  Just do it, as the advertising says.  You don't have to wait for the New Year.  So, no, I don't do that type of planning.

I do a bit of financial planning.  I don't do a lot.  To be perfectly honest, finance bores me to tears.  Oh, I know that in our society you have to have money.  I try to be prudent.  I try to pay attention to what the bankers tell me about putting money into investments.  But don't ever make me the treasurer of any organization.  Don't ever put me on the fundraising committee.  Money simply does not interest me.  I know I have to have it, I know I have to be prudent about it.  I don't have to be phenomenally interested in it.

My two brothers do even less planning about money than I do, for completely different reasons.  One cares about money even less than I do.  My other brother has a lot more money.  But he's not too terribly interested in money either.  He seems to have the facility that if he wants to buy something, he knows how to make enough money to do it.  Even if that something is really expensive.  So he doesn't worry about money, because he just always feels he can make enough.  And, he's generally right.  But this probably doesn't get us any farther, in dealing with planning.

As well as being a security consultant, I am also a management consultant.  When you're in management, you tend to make an *awful* lot of plans.  You make plans for what you will do if the people higher up in management agreed to your proposal.  You make plans for how to continue the work that you are doing right now, into the future.  You make plans for what to do if management in the layers above you turns down your proposals.  You make an awful lot of plans, and an awful lot of those plans you know have a good chance of never actually happening.

Returning to the idea of emergency planning, everyone who does it is quite well aware of the fact that the plans that you make are never going to exactly fit with the disaster that actually happens.  In the military, they have a saying that no battle plan survives first contact with the enemy.  It's pretty much the same idea in emergency management.  You make plans, you make plans for all kinds of eventuality.  You make plans for different types of disasters that can happen.  You make lots of different plans, thinking about lots of different disasters that can happen.

I remember teaching at NASA.  Dealing with business continuity planning, both I, and the class, were pretty sure that this was not something I needed to go over in depth.  After all, NASA has had lots of experience in dealing with disasters.  So I got to the part of the material that talked about taking all of your plans, addressing all kinds of different disasters, and putting it all together into one big business continuity plan.  And one of the guys, sitting in the front row, suddenly sat bolt upright and got that deer-in-the-headlights look.  I looked at him and asked, "Trouble?"  He said, "We don't have a business continuity plan."  I looked at him, questioningly, and he said, "We have the world's best hurricane plan, but we don't have a business continuity plan."  Next coffee break there were meetings in every corner of the room, and out in the hallways, and I just knew that for the next three weeks there were going to be all kinds of meetings in different areas of NASA.

You try to make all kinds of plans, and you think about everything you can think of that will possibly go wrong, but it never goes wrong and quite the way you thought it would, and it never affects you in exactly the way that you plan for.  Everybody in emergency management knows that you do all kinds of planning in advance, but then you have all kinds of minor problems with the plans that you have made, and the disaster that you are actually facing.  The plans never work out.  Not exactly as planned, anyway.

Let's go back to career planning.  My career history is pretty weird.  On my fiftieth birthday, Gloria threw me a really wonderful party, and tried to list all the jobs that I had had, hoping to be able to get pretty close to fifty.  She got to fifty-six.  My career history is not so much chequered as plaid.

I didn't start out to be a security maven.  I didn't start out to be an author.  I didn't even start out to be a teacher.  What I wanted to be, when I was a kid, was a doctor.  When I got to university, it was at a point where it was pretty much impossible to get into medical school.  So, I did other things, but I really wasn't sure what I wanted to do.  I knew that I *didn't* want to be a teacher, because both of my parents were teachers.  And they weren't particularly happy about it.  My dad, in giving me some career advice one time, said that I should be a teacher because you could put in your thirty years and then retire and get out.  I thought that was pretty bad career advice.  Eventually I realized that they probably weren't very good teachers, either of them, and they certainly didn't love teaching.  When I was almost forced to become a teacher, I realized two things: one, I had been doing it for years, and two, I loved it.  But I didn't set out to be a teacher.  I didn't plan it.  Teaching, like I say, was pretty much forced upon me.  And it turned out to be pretty good.  I love teaching.

I didn't set out to write books.  If I had planned to write books, you would have thought that I would have paid more attention in English class.  I always *hated* English.  As a school subject.  I hated Language, I hated Writing, I hated Humanities, I hated whatever they called the course that they were teaching about English.  Partly, what they were teaching, in English classes, was phenomenally silly.  It was not of any interest to me.  I hated English.  As a subject.

I love the English language.  It was a love that I shared with Gloria.  We would discuss the origins of words, where they came from, the different languages that they came from, the patterns that you could find in the English language, indicating whether a word came from Greek, or Latin, or one of the Teutonic languages: we were just always really interested in the English language, it's structure, it's grammar, it's vocabulary, and even it's weirdness.

And when people ask me about writing a book, I make the joke that when you find a good copy editor, you marry her.  Now Gloria was a great copy editor, and an editor on all the other levels, as well.  But when I married Gloria I had no idea that I was going to write books.  It just sort of happened.  Gloria definitely helped me to write books, and now that she is dead, I doubt that I'll be able to write another book.  But I didn't marry her with the intention of writing books.  I didn't plan for it.  It just happened.

I didn't plan to be a security maven.  In other places you may have heard me tell about how the fact that I got fired from teaching, got me into security research, and, over a period of about twenty or thirty years, meant that I was teaching security all over the world.  But I didn't plan that.  It just kind of happened.  It's been great!  But I didn't plan it.

I want to make clear, at this point, that I am not making any great claims to living by faith.  I didn't.  All of these non-plans, that just happened to me, that have resulted in wonderful things, at the time, I didn't like very much.  Or at least possibly didn't like very much.  Or at least, didn't appreciate what was going to result.

Gloria was a wonderful wife for me.  Gloria taught me a lot, Gloria allowed me to pursue the field of information security, Gloria got me into writing books, encouraged me, supported me, and it's absolutely true that I never would have written any of the books that I've written without Gloria.  When you are bereaved, a lot of people try and console you with the statement that your loved one is still with you, in a sense.  Gloria is still with me in a very *real* sense, because I am much different now, because of Gloria, then I was when I married her.

But I can't claim that I foresaw, or appreciated, or even would have appreciated if you had told me, what was happening, and what would happen.  I had always been interested in having children.  When I am married Gloria, I knew that she had had her children, and didn't intend to have anymore.  Subsequently, of course, that resulted in me having grandchildren, and great-grandchildren, and I frequently tell people that so many people had told me that if they'd known children were this much fun, they'd have had them first, so I did.  But, at the time, when I was marrying Gloria, I thought that I was somehow accepting something less than what I really wanted, because we were not going to have children.  Had I allowed that to influence my actions and behavior, and had I not married Gloria because of that consideration, I would have lost out on *so* many wonderful things.  But I can't claim that I had faith that everything was going to turn out all right.  I had no idea what was going to happen.  Really and truly.  And I probably married Gloria for what were very selfish, and unreasonable, reasons.  But it turned out to be wonderful.

And then Gloria died.  And I am left alone, and lonely, and a grieving widower, and I have lost my wife, and my home, and my best friend, and my job, and my reason for being, and my purpose in life, and I am a depressed suicidal grieving widower.  I didn't expect that either.  I certainly didn't plan on it.  But it happened.

And some very interesting things might come out of it.  I don't know yet, but I'm already seeing glimmers of things that being bereaved, grieving Gloria's death, grieving my loss of Gloria, grieving my own loneliness, are having an effect on me, are teaching me things.  Things that I didn't plan on.

Now, I have heard a lot of sermons very similar to this, which end up making the point that God works all things for our good, and, if you are having a hard time right now or going through a rough patch, God is going to make it all right in the end.

That is not the point that I want to make.  This sermon is not aimed at those who are having a tough time right now.  I know, because I have sat through those sermons, that when I have been going through a very difficult time, they don't help.  We have to hope that God is working all things for our good, and we have to have faith that God is working all things for our good.  But those who are in difficulty, those who are in pain, those who are already damaged by whatever has happened to them, those who are in distress are trying to maintain their faith, in the teeth of the evidence that tells them that God does *not* care about them and that the world does not care whether they live or die.  They have little to hope for.  They are trying to maintain hope and faith.  But it's difficult. To just say to someone, God is going to make it all better, when they are in difficulty, doesn't actually help very much.  We read in Proverbs 25:20, and repeated again in James 2:15,16, the words "Behold!  Charlie Brown and Linus were outside bundled up against the freezing, driving snow.  And lo, they looked and beheld Snoopy, who was shivering in the cold.  And they went unto him, and spake unto him saying, 'Be of good cheer, Snoopy!'  'Yes, be of good cheer!'  And then they walked off.  And Snoopy was still just as cold."

https://www.flickr.com/photos/medievalkarl/6218074390

https://playingintheworldgame.com/2013/09/13/be-of-good-cheer/

https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/peanuts/images/8/82/19551216.gif/

https://peanuts.fandom.com/wiki/December_1955_comic_strips

Well, okay, that translation was from the Old Canadian Deviant Bible, and your particular translation may not have exactly that wording.  But that's the gist of what those passages say.  Praising God to someone who is already in pain is like pouring vinegar on a wound, or even taking away a coat from someone on a cold day.  What good does it do your brother, who is in pain, if you just say I hope you are warm and have plenty of food, and don't do anything about it?  So, no, this sermon is not to tell those who are going through dark times to buck up, have faith, and God will make things okay.

No, this sermon is aimed at those for whom life is, pretty much, okay right now.  This sermon is aimed at those whose plans are, generally, or at least sometimes, working out.  And so, to those of you who are not in particular distress right now (and I know that we all have troubles from time to time, and our own troubles are always bigger than anybody else's troubles), if you know of somebody who is, actually, in distress, yes, maybe God is trying to teach them something with that distress.  I know the poem and the song, "I walked a mile with pleasure/ she chattered all the way/ leaving me none the wiser/ with all she had to say./  And I walked a mile with sorrow/ and never a word said she,/ but all the things I learned from her/ when sorrow walked with me."  So, yes, possibly God is trying to teach that person something.

But also, possibly, God is giving *you* a chance to do something.  God is giving you a chance to help.  God is possibly even giving you a chance to *learn* how to help.  We talk an awful lot about loving each other, and comforting each other, and coming alongside each other, and supporting each other.  But it's actually difficult.  Coming alongside someone else means finding out what it is that they actually do need.  Finding out what their actual pain is.  Not the pain or difficulty that we would see if we were in their situation, but what pain they actually do see, themselves.  It also means accepting; no not just accepting: it means overcoming our discomfort with *their* pain or difficulty.  We are sometimes disturbed by the fact that someone else is in difficulty, because our faith may not be terribly strong, and it may rest on the fact that, by and large, our life is okay.  And we figure that's because God is taking care of us.  And if we look at someone else's life, and they are in difficulty, and that difficulty doesn't respond to simple fixes or cliches, maybe that means that our life could get difficult too.  And we're uncomfortable with that thought.  So we have to overcome our discomfort at someone else's discomfort before we can help.

So, no, the point of this sermon is not, or at least not solely, that everything will be OK.  The point is not that you should make plans.  The point is not that you *shouldn't* make plans.  The point is, as I said right at the beginning, we are not in control.  God is.  And therefore, in everything give thanks.

Now, I realize that that sounds an awful lot like "everything will be OK."  But there is a difference.  Give thanks, even if you don't feel thankful.  Do I feel grateful that God killed Gloria?  No, definitely not yet.  (And, please, if you want to respond to that, don't bother if your sentence is going to start out with, "At least.")  I know that God has given Gloria her resurrection body, and that she is, at last, out of pain, and that God loves her and cares for her more and better than I ever did or could.  But I don't know why God didn't kill me, too.  I don't know why I am here, all alone, and lonely.

But I have to thank God for it.  Even if I don't feel particularly happy about it.  Because I have to believe that God is in control, and God has plans and purposes, and those plans and purposes are for our good, even if we don't see the good, yet.  And may not see it before we die.  We do not know those plans, or why they are necessary.  We may not even have the capacity to understand them.

We can ask God, when we get to heaven.  But, as Gloria was once told by one of the Regent faculty (and as she frequently repeated), once we get there, those questions may suddenly seem like asking, "God, why did you purple?"

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